Guild Wars 2

Bunkers are far from unkillable. Look at what a coordinated team can do to a full bunker guardian in tournaments, heck even a Necro + burst class can at the very least force a bunker to blow their defensive CDs or be downed.

Dagger single target damage is insane, it isn’t the place for us to get cleave.

The only way to guarantee two ticks is to have 2 seconds or more of duration. However if you are properly using terror (applying a condition first for the extra damage), anything around 1.5-1.7s should be enough.

You do not require 2 seconds of fear to get 2 ticks of terror, this is the same for all damaging conditions. When you first apply a condition to a target, it starts a timer. Every condition applied thereafter is on the exact same timer. That timer determines the ticks, meaning that all ticks tick at the same time.

So, if I apply a bleed, and then 0.5 seconds later apply a 1.6 second fear, the fear will tick at the timer of 1 second, with 1.1 seconds of fear left (tick 1) then again when there is 0.1 seconds of fear left (tick 2).

The plan is every week will be live from now on.

Stream going up in just a few.

We will be live shortly.

I’m glad we’ve helped out, this is why the podcast exists

We accept anyone in BoC, we only ask that you rep if you are doing All Necro events, otherwise it is not mandatory to rep at all (in fact, most of us don’t).

I don’t think weakness is meant to be strictly damage reduction, you have to remember that it completely nullifies vigor, in addition to having a decent damage reduction (certainly not huge).

The other problem would be if weakness became too strong as a damage reduction mechanic; as it also stacks with protection. Meaning weakness would not only be (on average) a 25% damage reduction, but now protection is mitigating 33% of the damage left over, meaning you would take about 50% damage.

Note, last minute change, we have another top level PvP necro lined up to be guest, but it is not Zombify, who unfortunately had something come up last minute, and will instead be tracked down and forced to appear at a later date.

They can make them more meaningful in PvE just by making bosses more difficult, and stop with all the punishing for conditions, and completely lack of boon punishment. Right now there are quite a few bosses with mechanics that punish using conditions, but close to nothing that punishes boons.

For PvP, issues are a bit more complicated. Its not that weakness, poison, and chill are weak (in fact, letting chill stay on you for a long time will devastate just about any build, weakness nullifies vigor, poison craps on a lot of healing), its that the other forms of support are much easier to utilize. You can stick a guardian on a team, and it takes very little coordination for him to do his job. I think Necro support will see more play when teams are much more comfortable with playing with the more difficult mechanics.

I’d bet that a Necro support, put into a strong condi-cleave comp could do wonders. The conditions could cover each other, a Necro with a smart team can heal for a lot, put up boons, remove conditions, and apply strong pressure with either Epidemic or CB. But again, it requires a team that is willing to run the difficult comp instead of the much easier guard/ele support combo.

For our first live streamed podcast, our guest is the one and only Zombify, an amazing Necromancer (and player in general) and leader of the SOAC team.

We will be live around 5pm PST at http://twitch.tv/soacgaming and will go for about an hour (we might have to cut this one early). We welcome everyone to come and listen to us, and take a more active role by being able to ask questions of us live! Feel free to ask questions, make comments, and interact with the hosts and guest.

Other classes can support in more meaningful ways, is more accurate. Necromancers have viable support with strong control and healing, but in PvE boon stacking as support is more viable because of dungeon mechanics, and in PvP our support doesn’t mesh with the meta, and requires people to stand in wells, which is difficult and not always safe.

Basically other classes support by removing conditions and buffing and healing allies. Necromancers also heal allies, and we do have some condition removal, but we don’t have the same ability to buff allies that they do. Our support requires you to stand in a well for its full duration, something that isn’t really the best way to support in PvP. Now, the extra thing that we bring that no one else does, is tons of condition application, notably lots of weakness, and lots of chill.

So whats the problem? It lies in the fact that our method of support (debuffing enemies instead of buffing allies) isn’t wanted, and the way that we support (with wells) can be counter productive and easily countered. In addition, every support brings a second thing they can do. Eles can burst or bunker, Guardians bunker, but Necromancers bring AoE condi pressure. Problem is, the meta really hurts that pressure.

Necro support has a niche, but it won’t be seen in PvE until they make different boss mechanics, or in PvP until that niche is worthwhile.

Why would it be different here? Because it is a different game.

Necromancers shouldn’t have full control over minions, or have a UI to do such. The only “UI” type thing I would like to see is something similar to what they introduced in GW1, where you could see the HP bars of your minions. Just make the AI work perfectly instead of messing up, and we’re good to go.

natsos.3692:

Necromancer is SIMPLY, the lord of Death and anything that comes with it. It doesn’t have to do with manipulation, it has to do with “dark energy” , with rasing the dead and sucking all life.

Yeah, not really. If you want to talk about Fantasy Necromancers, then you cannot have a singular opinion, because there is no singular archetype of fantasy necromancers. There is a lot of variance in the different fantasy ideas on Necromancy, everything from the moral/ethical implications, to what their power entails, to even the magnitude of that power.

As for “actual” Necromancy, it deals solely with the raising of the spirits of the dead. No sucking out life, no poisoning, no curses/hexes, all of the stuff comes from the association with Black Magic.

flow.6043:

The same could also apply to an extra teleport for the necromancer. In this case, when there’s nothing nearby to get lf from then the cd is doubled. (as an example..)

We aren’t supposed to be mobile. We are not getting a forward teleport/movement because it is against the profession design ANet wants for us. It is not a matter of increasing CD if we use it as a movement ability, its a matter of it just isn’t going to happen (unless I’ve totally misread ANet).

We have 2 ways to physically get closer to our opponent, Spectral Grasp and Dark Path. I wouldn’t be surprised if we got more love on the side of pulls, but we aren’t going to be getting lots of gap closers (they want us to use conditions to stay in range more than anything).

Can you not Necro 8 month old threads when we get this exact same topic every week at the least?

KarlaGrey.5903:

As I said, designing pets without having them either over- or underperform is hard, and Anet shouldn’t be wasting time on that. But the damage is done, and they will eventually have to do something to fix it.

And yea, minions work ok on stationary targets, I suppose (it’s the golem charge that is owning the treb, right?

Yes. An MM is, to my knowledge, the strongest treb killer simply because once you get the minions on the treb, Golem Charge + Putrid Explosions is over half the treb’s HP. You should be able to take out treb against at least 2 people as an MM.

vicious.5683:

why great axe? I can’t see it as a dark arts weapon.

Executioner style axe. Great axes tend to be more the more evil side of the more generic weapon set.

We will be doing the podcast live on Thursday around 5pm. We are hoping to have webcams up as well in the future to give you guys something to look at, but at the moment we aren’t 100% sure how to accomplish this with what we have.

Auto attack be a chain of attacks that all cleave, the last attack should cripple enemies for a short duration.

2: Corrupts X amount of boons (probably 1, on a low CD)

3: PBAoE health steal, but you also “steal” a condition from each enemy affected. So if you steal HP from someone with 8 stacks of bleeding, you also take away that bleeding from them and it is given to you.

4: A channel that copies one condition from you to up to 5 enemies in the area per pulse, pulses X times.

5: A PBAoE pull that inflicts a condition and gives LF per person pulled.

If we did get Greataxe, I’d like to see it being PBAoE with some cleave, although not necessarily very high damage. I’d also like to see some more condition application of control conditions, not necessarily damage ones, and some kind of way to add in condition “mastery”, such as an ability doing more damage the more conditions you have, or the copy mechanic that I said for 4.

For the weapon skills, I just threw out ideas I thought would be interesting mechanics. I won’t even pretend I thought overly about balance. But I think we need more self-punishment and then ways to play with that punishment beyond just “give yourself condition, give condition to enemy”, and also a way to punish boons that isn’t on a huge CD, when boon application in its current form has a lot of continuous applications.

@flow

Yes/No. RTL had its range fixed to its proper length, but now it has double CD if it does not hit a target, effectively meaning if you wish to use RTL as a movement ability only, it will cost you, whereas using it as a gap closer to an enemy will not.

Spectral Return, Portal, Nectrotic Traversal, Mesmer staff 2, and some Thief abilities (maybe some abilities elsewhere I am not aware of), are all examples of abilities that either return you to somewhere you previously were, or create a gap, without being “movement” skills in the sense that they don’t allow you to get forward faster. Specifically, ANet doesn’t want certain class, especially Necromancers to become highly mobile roamers that can get all over the map quickly like a Thief. These abilities allow the person to make room between themselves and a player, or in other cases get back somewhere quickly, but they don’t allow you to actually roam around effectively.

On the other hand, RTL, Blink, Flash, and the various Shadowsteps Thief have are all able to be used to roam. We will never get those kinds of abilities that allow us to be roamers, what we are more likely to get are gap closers/creators. More specifically, ways to be more mobile in combat and not outside of it.

They don’t want us to have finishers, especially on weapons, since we are in the contending for most combo fields possible.

Staff 3, Well of Blood/Suffering/Corruption/Power, CPC, Spectral wall, and up to 6 Death Novas. In a single build, that means you could easily have 5 combo fields and still be considered viable.

Guardians and Elementalists (and Eles only when Staff) are the only classes that can match our combo field output, which makes sense considering they are both considered support classes (and even then, they follow the general rules of more fields = less finishers).

Thieves have barely any fields, same as warriors. The tendency is that the more fields you have, the fewer finishers you get (MM being a complete break away, having up to 7 fields and up to 7 finishers). What happens is builds with lots of finishers then set up combos for their teammates, thus creating a necessity for teamwork for actually maximizing efficiency. The general best is that you have moderate of each, and then can combo off of yourself, but even then you want allies comboing with you for added effects.

I don’t think ANet should hold back balance, nor do I think the class is balanced as is, don’t get me wrong. They need to look at having every class in a realistic state of balance (with the realization that balance should not be based solely on meta), and this is true of the Necromancer as well.

I’m merely debating the idea that “I am rank X on charts and I play Necro for this awesome team, that means I am the most knowledgeable about Necro”, when that isn’t accurate. To be a great Necromancer player, the absolute only requirement is that you are good at playing Necromancer. Everything else is secondary and independent. They might be great theorists, they might explore builds, they might perfect existing builds, that is all true. But that is all secondary things that they are; on top of being great players. You can be a great theorist and not so great of a player, and vice versa, they are independent (although related).

Put in the gear (sigils, runes, accessory stats) if you could.

Imo, drop the mark stuff. Marks doing extra damage means little since you shouldn’t be in staff often, and soul marks aren’t great since frankly the LF generation in PvE is amazing. I’d also highly suggest going 25 into Curses, it might seem weird but 2% damage per condition is a huge boost to your DPS when a team can easily keep up 5 conditions. Also, no point getting the on downed fear, its not worth it.

If you are looking for a Well siphon build, you will probably be looking at X/X/0/30/0. I personally suggest 25 in curses (you want 10 in there for the fury anyway, so you can’t go 30 into Spite for the close to death, which means the extra damage per condi makes it up).

Oh, and pick up Lich form. I don’t know what the Golem is, but I doubt it will do much better than an easy 8k per auto from Lich.

There are plenty of other players who can nuke a point just as strongly as a necro can, and a bunker can afford to pop the defensive CDs to stay on point through the 5 seconds of pressure you put out. I’d bet this build shines in 1v1 point assault where you can drop the wells, get the decap (or stomp if they stay) then go on, but if you are the one on defense they can just stand off point for a few seconds to wait for your light show to finish. That is why you can’t just drop your wells willy-nilly.

Blaine isn’t trying to prove that Necromancers have secret builds, he’s putting forth that possibility. The reality is that people at the top are at the top for being great players, not for being great theorists. Think of the difference between athletes and sports scientists.

That isn’t to say that top players aren’t great, and knowledgeable, but their skill at the class does not qualify them as the be all end all of knowledge. The reality is that, as Blaine said, top players often have no idea about the new “big thing”. Look at LoL, there are more people taking that game more seriously than anyone takes GW2, and there are still “sleeper” champions that rise up from absolutely nowhere because someone found out they were underappreciated.

Because its a team game, and with few exceptions (eles) very few classes get a lot of finishers and fields in one.

Also, minions have finishers galore. Bone minions = 2x blast finisher, Bone fiend = 2x projectile finisher (100%), Flesh Wurm = 1x projectile finisher & 1x Blast finisher (although to be fair you’ll pretty much never get a finisher with it except by sheer luck).

Requiring 30 in Curses and high precision. Or, you could drop this and let an ele wail on it with blast finishers.

You can get a second tick of fear with any duration over 1 second, so long as you apply it after a condition is already on the target in question. After that, its just a matter of how your fear’s duration matches up with the timer. Basically, when a condition is put on a target, it starts a timer that ticks once a second from then until conditions are gone. This “tick” each second applies to all conditions on that target. So if, for example, you applied a bleed, and then 0.6 seconds later applied a 1.5 second fear, that fear would tick at the 1 second mark, with 1.1 seconds of duration left, then again at the 2 second mark, and expire before ticking a third time.

Interesting idea.

No, it shouldn’t. Weakness is underrated but a field of stacking weakness would wreck people in PvP, and PvE its actually a good way to mitigate damage.

Awesome spreadsheet. Just something to change for me, I am looking for a consistent team, and my availability is 1-5pm and 9pm-12pm both PST weekdays, all day weekends.

I definitely like the idea of increasing the size of CPC, since it is supposed to be an area denial, it needs to actually have a large enough size to, you know, deny an area.

Not movement speed, but movement abilities. They stated a while ago (and I’m not sure how much they are scaling back, mind you) that they want Thief to be by far the most mobile class. The recent nerf to RTL was part of this. They don’t want every class to have easy access to movement skills that get you around the map faster; as that is supposed to be the Thief’s role.

And yes it would provide an escape. However I think DS should be solely an escape, not a forward moving mechanism. DS 2, while certainly not perfect and needs work, is what we are supposed to use to close gaps, it makes no sense to add in another gap closer to DS. Make it have some kind of damage avoidance/gap creator, without being able to be used in moving faster.

I don’t think it is inherently OP (talking specifically of the movement part, not the rest), I just think ANet does not want us to have it. Dark Path used to be a teleport, and they axed it, and I don’t see them giving it back to us. On the same note, they are scaling back (forward) movement on all classes, so I don’t see this happening.

I think DS 5 should be strictly an escape/damage avoidance ability. We don’t need a forward teleport, we need a way to get out.

I do agree that something would need to be different about self/ally casting. Longer CD makes sense, trading off reliability for less uses.

Not a great build but not terrible. You burst conditions by doing all your skills with bleeds (and staff 3 usually). So Staff 2+3, swap, Scepter 2, Dagger 5, DS 5, with geomancy sigil that will give you 15 stacks of bleeds, then you Doom them to force them to eat the bleeds for a while longer, and Epidemic if you want (Doom should cover the cast time).

That seems totally balanced… Well, I did say I hadn’t thought it through much :P

Obviously a self cast would always work, however that requires you to sit on those conditions (and it doesn’t cleanse them), so the only way you could get off a 25 stack of bleed Epidemic is if you were willing to take that gamble. It could bring back some of the old feel of gambling with your life for game changing plays that many Necros miss with the old sacrifice system.

Not really unreliable when you can blow them up to make a poison field, but minions are very rare at higher levels of PvP.

There is no reason for it to look like a whip.

SPESHAL.9106:

Bhawb.7408:

He was talking about Closed Beta. Look at footage (there is a bit), and you’ll see what he means. We had the best of everything.

I suspected he was talking about closed beta even though I just played since release.

In any case, lets assume necros were OP in Beta. How much more OP could they have been than Thieves. Maybe it is him who needs a history lesson. Do you remember at release when they could global someone?

It wasn’t til months into release that they finally started to make piecemeal nerfs to heartseeker, pistol whip, signet, quickness, etc. Here we are 9 months later and they STILL can own a necro despite the nerfs.

Exactly how “insane” was axe damage? Were Necros globaling people? How OP was DS teleport that made whack-a-mole necessary to bring them in line, but not Thieves at release???

I really don’t think you understand what we mean by OP. This isn’t the “oh man thief backstabbed me for 8k thats OP!” I’m literally saying that Lich Form’s auto attack had the same DPS as 100b, except you had far more survivability than a warrior has ever dreamed of, could do it while moving, and had no recharge time on it. You would 2 shot everything that wasn’t invulnerable.

Or lets say you didn’t like that kind of playstyle, and wanted to be a bunker? Sure, use DS and you can permanently facetank 4 players on your own.

If that wasn’t bad enough, every Necromancer had more mobility than what Eles currently have.

We were OP, that is a fact with absolutely no room for logical debate. We did everything better than anyone else, at once. So they completely gutted us and had to put it back together.

Necromancers are only bad at the highest levels of play in PvE (and arguably fine in fractals) and tPvP. PvE, except fractals and very few dungeons, is faceroll easy. You could bash your face against the keyboard repeatedly and come out of the dungeon fine. In these cases, DPS > everything. So you get the 4 warrior 1 mesmer (or in super hard dungeons, 3 warriors, 1 mesmer, 1 guardian) “meta”. It doesn’t mean necros are bad, just that it will take a little bit longer to finish a path. Fractals we can arguably do a lot of help. There are multiple people around the forums that have made great posts as to how they can bring something unique to Fractals. At the end of the day though, you don’t need a Necro in your party like you need a class with projectile reflect. Again, Necromancers can run higher fractals, just not quite as fast.

In tPvP it has to do with the fact that Necromancer builds require you to build your team around them in some respect. This means we don’t make good “puggers”, and it means that you actually need 4 people who are okay with having the team in some way built around you. We also can’t handle focus like other classes can, which means you need your team to be able to peel for you, especially if they CC you. Other than that, every complaint is based around very specific builds that people run, and not what the class is in general (for PvP).

We definitely need some fixes for PvP, and PvE just needs to have content introduced that is actually difficult and isn’t based on mechanics we don’t have access to (or they need to give us those mechanics). That said, people come on to the forums to complain, and what you see here are the most annoyed, angry, vindictive Necromancers in the game, by no means are the forums representative of the real population.

Just a thought I had, by no means have I thought out if this would be a good change or not. But basically, what does everyone think of making Epidemic castable on allies and/or yourself? From a point of view of fun, I could see this being very fun, especially the self castable making Plague Signet much more viable, and would certainly make me feel like more of a master of conditions. However I’d like to know what other people think, both about the fun-factor, and the balance.

The only classes that revolve around AI are Rangers and Mesmers, both of which have primary mechanics that rely on AI, and both of which are incredibly common on competitive teams for their strength in the current meta. Everyone else has, at most, optional AI summons.

Unlikely, its a bug fix patch, and they just announced they were thinking of a skill last month, I’d be surprised if it was done yet.

WvW MMs don’t work for zergs. Unless you are planning to go around soloing supply camps/dolyaks (or close to it, group size shouldn’t be much more than 5), then I would not suggest using minions. They get cleaved down by AoE too easily.

They are quite good in those small groups though, if you can manage to avoid the zerg and just flip camps.

I’ll have to go through and test it again, its been a while and I wanted to test their attack speeds anyway. I know for sure that marks will acquire aggro, but if I do remember correctly they can also change aggro under certain situations. I’ll test to see what the conditions are, but you can always staff auto to “override” the mark’s aggro.